


Take Your Time, And Take Mine Too

by luninosity



Series: Oh Boy! Or, Life's Better With A Buddy Holly Soundtrack [14]
Category: British Actor RPF, X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Also Hugh Is A Good Shoulder To Lean On, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Commitment, Conversations, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Happy Ending, Hard On Both Of Them, Hope, Love, M/M, Michael Needs All The Hugs, Nightmares, Recovery, Unspecified Past Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 19:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2282385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael doesn’t mean to fall apart. He does regardless. It’s not James’s fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Your Time, And Take Mine Too

**Author's Note:**

> As far as internal chronology, the latest in the series.
> 
> For the anon on tumblr who asked for upset!Michael needing comfort, ages ago. (Sorry!)
> 
> Title, opening, and closing lines from Buddy Holly’s “Take Your Time.”

_ take your time, though it’s late _   
_ heartstrings will sing _   
_ like a string of twine _   
_ if you take your time _   
_ take your time, and take mine too… _

  
  
Michael doesn’t mean to fall apart on Hugh’s shoulder. He does regardless.   
  
He nearly starts to hate himself for the weakness, but he can’t. Not yet, anyway. No room. His soul hurts. Exhausted. Pared to the bone.   
  
It’s not James’s fault. Michael knows that. He can’t be angry at James. He can’t collapse in front of James. Not when James needs him to be strong. James needs a support pillar, a fortress, arms in the dark. James wakes up shivering and cold from freezing nightmares and still throws coruscating grins Michael’s way in the light of day. James is his other half, his more adorable Scottish-imp bakery-god _better_ half, and he tries and fails to say as much while crumpling into a heap of weary bones while Hugh pats his back.   
  
“I know,” Hugh says, and pats him again. “It’s okay, mate.” That faded-desert Aussie accent makes all the words realer somehow. Sincerity underscored by the red rock of the outback. “You love him, I know.”   
  
“I’m sorry,” Michael tries, and Hugh says, “You moron, stop that,” and thwaps the back of his head, but gently so. Michael gulps back tears and unexpected laughter, which turns into hiccups, and then he has to put his head down and breathe for a while.   
  
They’re sitting on the floor of the men’s room. They’re sitting on the floor of the men’s room in a television studio. They’re sitting on the floor of a men’s room because up until five minutes ago all three of them—Michael, Hugh, and James—had been happily performing for cameras and interviewers, laughing and answering questions on the Days of Future Past press tour.   
  
James has been stupendous. Making jokes, tipping that head and grinning, waving articulate hands in great sweeps through the air. Casual, confident, laid-back.    
  
No hints of fear or fright. No wobbling, off-balance and in need of a hand.   
  
Michael _knows_ how strong James is. Michael knows how strong James is, and how many years James has been strong without him. James is built of wind-whipped granite and lofty crags and legends, all wrapped up in a pint-sized freckled package that snores on Michael’s shoulder during plane flights. James copes with everything.   
  
James says that it’s better, says that nightmares and icy hands and creeping spine-chills are better, with Michael beside him. Michael wants to believe that’s true, and on good days even does.   
  
James has been so good these past few days. An upswing. A reprieve for no reason at all.   
  
It’s the unpredictability that’s hitting Michael over the head right now. He’d been watching James pose for photos, smile at fans, sign autographs for the lighting crew; and out of nowhere too many emotions had kicked him in the chest.   
  
He’d fled. Hugh, observing with kind-eyed older-brother perspicacity, had followed, and put an arm around his shoulders, and sat with him under the watchful gaze of the television-studio sinks and restroom stalls.   
  
He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know how to do this.   
  
Some days he thinks he does. When James looks at him with a brilliant weary smile and tells him that being held feels right.    
  
Some nights are bad and they’ve figured out why, the hints of pattern, James hating unfamiliar shadows and skinny black shapes beside the bed and stress, the last of those not necessarily connected to that persistent dream but not helping either.   
  
Some nights are bad and he has no fucking clue why, and all he can do is offer arms and chocolate and love, as James awakens wide-eyed and trembling and needing too long to recognize him and breathe again. The chocolate sometimes helps—there’s a theory floating around about low blood sugar and night terrors, though it’s unproved, mostly intriguing correlation—and sometimes not; it’s not always chocolate, Michael’s tried buying all sorts of juice and honeyed treats and candied mango. He suspects that it’s partly just the comfort of tangible sensation: bursts of sweetness and cocoa and key lime and raspberry and white pepper and pistachio have to mean that James is awake. Really truly tasting flavors, inhaling dry night air, wrapped in the warmth of Michael’s body.   
  
Some nights are good when they should be. At home. Cozy. Secure.   
  
Some nights are good when they shouldn’t be, when every usual indicator proclaims that they shouldn’t.   
  
Michael, confused and sick at heart with all the not knowing and afraid that it’ll never get better, lets Hugh pat him on the shoulder again. One last gulp of salt.   
  
He doesn’t care if it doesn’t get better, not the way that James sometimes thinks he should. They’ve had arguments over that one, mostly dwindled into optimism now. Whatever happens, Michael loves him. Michael’s signing up for this knowingly, both eyes and heart thrown open. And he doesn’t give a damn about possibly never getting a good night’s sleep ever again.   
  
In all fairness, it’s not that bad. Maybe once a month. More. Less. A little less these days, maybe, though he’s been scared to keep track.   
  
He’s scared that…   
  
…that he won’t be enough. That he’s not doing enough. That he could be doing more. That James _could_ get better, if Michael could just do more.   
  
“I’m all right,” he manages, sitting up, swiping a hand across his face. No way to clean up his heart, though. “Sorry.”   
  
Hugh waves away the apology with one supposedly thoughtless hand, though his eyes’re concerned. “You and James, everything good? Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, I just saw you watchin’ him right before we ended up here.”   
  
“He’s incredible.” Michael pulls his knees up and wraps arms around them. “I love him. He loves me.”   
  
“Yeah, you said. And I know you do. Sickening, the two of you. Lovebirds camped beside a billabong.”   
  
“I want to tell you,” Michael says. “I can’t—I mean, it’s his secret. To tell. I can’t…what the hell is a billabong?”   
  
“It’s a pond. Heathen. He know how you feel about it?”   
  
“…no. Yes. I don’t know.” He’d not be surprised. James is that perceptive. “He knows I’m trying. I can’t tell him this. It’d kill him.”   
  
“James? Nah. Kid’s stronger than that. Kid, I’m sayin’. Like he’s Hoult’s age. But he’s younger than both of us—he is younger than you, right?—so. My point is, totally happy to be here, whatever you need, but if it’s about him, you’re gonna have to suck it up and talk to him and not me, sometime.”   
  
“Two years.” Michael runs a hand over his face. “I mean he’s two years younger than me. You, like a decade, or something.”   
  
“Thanks, mate.”   
  
“You know what I mean. Thank you.”   
  
“Yeah, I got that.”   
  
“I forget that,” Michael says. “I never think about it. He’s always—he’s been doing this longer than I have, he’s fucking charming with reporters, he’s so damn good with people—it’s two years, y’know, it doesn’t even matter. Sometimes he shows up with BB guns on set and shoots me through a skylight and I remember. I didn’t buy the damn BB guns.”   
  
“No, but you ran around shooting people with even better aim.” Hugh grins. “You’re his age, not mine. A decade, you said.”   
  
“You’re not going to let me forget that, are you.”   
  
“Not a chance. You want to tell me anything while we’re here? I swear on the soul of Steve Irwin not to repeat it.”   
  
“That’s not even a real promise.”   
  
“Don’t insult my heritage, kid. Man’s a national treasure. I mean it, y’know.”   
  
“I’m not _enough_ ,” Michael says, not crying because the heartache’s become a ball of misery lodged in his throat, “I’m not—it’s not about sex, stop making that expression—I don’t know how to help him, I can’t, I’m not,” and then ends up telling Hugh everything, or ninety percent of everything, not about James’s nightmares but everything else, up to and including the night he got honey in James’s hair in a Paris hotel while aiming for soothing petting.   
  
Hugh listens. Michael talks until the words dry up. Until they just sort of stop, fading away on their own.   
  
The sudden absence leaves him lighter, oddly dizzy, desiccated. Dandelion-fluff and dried seed-pods blown by a stiff wind.   
  
But that’s not a bad feeling. Certainly less heavy.   
  
“Huh,” is all Hugh says. “Feeling better?”   
  
“I…yeah. Sort of. Yes. Thanks.”   
  
“I texted him,” Hugh says, “like twenty minutes ago, by the way, after he texted me, after he texted _you_ and you didn’t answer. He’s probably outside pretending he’s not about to panic.”   
  
“Oh…”   
  
“Come on.” Hugh gives him a hand up, and then stops, so they’re face to face. “You do need to talk to him. Maybe not everything you said to me—and I know there’s more you didn’t say to me—but if you were him, you’d want to know.”   
  
“I know.”   
  
“For what it’s worth, from what you said, I think you’re doin’ fine.” Hugh squeezes his shoulder. “It’s a recovery thing, right?—I’m not about to ask, but it sounds like trauma to me, and the thing is, that’s never gonna be linear. He’s not gonna wake up and be one hundred percent, and it’s not straightforward, and there’s no magic head-curing serum for that. But he told you he’s doing better with you, right? And you believe him?”   
  
“…yes?”   
  
“So believe him. Better ain’t perfect, but it’s better.”   
  
“How’re you so fucking good at this,” Michael says, and laughs, ragged and waterstained.    
  
“ ’Cause I’m a superhero,” Hugh says, utterly deadpan. “Also ’cause I’m old.”   
  
“Wolverine doesn’t get old,” Michael grumbles, and takes a deep breath and steadies his shoulders. “Physical peak condition. Rejuvenation. Super-healing.”   
  
“Go read the Old Man Logan arc, Lehnsherr,” Hugh tosses back, and opens the door.   
  
James is waiting outside, leaning against a convenient wall and very obviously trying not to look like he’s been staring at the men’s room door. His eyes’re wide and worried, and he straightens up and practically runs the two steps to them, but then hesitates, hand lifting as if he wants to touch but is unsure of his welcome. “Michael—Hugh, thank you—Michael, are you—can I—”   
  
“Come here,” Michael tells him, and folds arms around him. James is shorter than he is, and sturdier, and just the right shape and size for Michael to hold. “I love you. So much.”   
  
“I love you, too.” James’s grip’s a bit too tight. Michael doesn’t complain. Doesn’t even want to. “Back to the hotel? Or—is there anything you need? Anything I can—I’ve got your sweater, and your sunglasses, you kind of left them when—do you want water? Food?”   
  
“Back to the hotel.” He presses one more kiss to the apprehensive top of James’s head, drawing away. Hugh has tactfully taken himself off somewhere. Michael makes a mental note to send him a bottle of something expensive and fire-flavored later. “Not food. Just you. Thank you for rescuing my sunglasses.”   
  
“Of course,” James says, eyes anxious and generous and full of love. Michael wants to kiss him again. Always. So damn honored to spend his life with this man.   
  
James holds his hand in the taxi and in the elevator up to their suite. Seems to be afraid to kiss him or to touch anywhere not indicated as acceptable. Michael’s heart turns over, fond to the point of breaking.   
  
James walks him to the bed and does a tiny head-tilt at the mattress and then hovers around the foot after Michael kicks off shoes and sits down. “Are you sure I can’t bake you some—”   
  
“I said just you. Come here.”   
  
James sighs but comes, probably in part because he’s unlikely to deny Michael anything at the moment. They get arms and legs entwined to mutual satisfaction; James breathes out softly against his cheek. “You don’t have to tell me, but—are you all right? Did Hugh—was he able to help? With…whatever you needed?”   
  
No accusation in that tone. Not from James. If Michael feels more comfortable with Hugh, if Michael needs Hugh, James will ask whether he’s okay, and step aside.   
  
“Better,” he says, and kisses the closest eyebrow. “Hold me for a minute?”   
  
“Always,” James says, “of course,” and proceeds to cling to him like a very determined octopus, arms and legs and football-honed muscles wholeheartedly committed to providing solace. Michael, lying safely amid all that unquestioning immediate affirmation, pulls courage into both hands and admits, “I’ve been needing to talk to you, I think…Hugh told me I was a moron…he’s sort of right, y’know. We owe him a bottle of good scotch.”   
  
“We.” The echo’s scared, and trying not to be; hopeful, and trying not to be.   
  
“Of course we,” Michael murmurs, and sticks his face into James’s neck and breathes for a second. “Completely us. You and me. I’m all right. And so’re you.”   
  
“Ah…I hope so, yes?”   
  
“I don’t always know what to do,” Michael says, and his voice cracks, not tears this time but the sheer weight of saying it to James.    
  
And then he has to say the rest of it. Has to pour his heart out all over again.   
  
He edits a little, not for content but for coherence. Easier the second time around; he’s said it once, acknowledged it as real, part of him. He doesn’t know how to not be inadequate. How to be adequate. Can’t be James’s anchor if he’s cracking under pressure in the depths.   
  
James doesn’t say anything, only holds him in their hotel-issue bed among rumpled sheets and pillowcases and the dying of the light outside. Fingers tense once or twice over his back, then ease up, as he talks. He wonders what blue eyes’re thinking.   
  
Eventually he finishes, “…so, um, I’m sorry?” And James actually sits up, stares at him, and promptly shoves him over onto his back and climbs atop him, flopping down with every ounce of Scottish-pixie weight. Michael says, “Oof?” because he really doesn’t have breath for anything else, what with the unexpected welcome impact.   
  
“You _are_ a moron,” James announces, leaning down so they’re nose to nose. “Don’t fuckin’ apologize. Not to me.”   
  
“Um…”   
  
“I love you.” Those eyes are thoroughly fierce. Blue as flame, and as intent. “I know I’ve got issues. My issues have issues. They’ve got cold hands and nightmares and abandonment and what-the-fuck-ever else. But that doesn’t mean you’re not important. If I haven’t been saying it enough, tell me, ’cause I’m always thinkin’ it, and sometimes you might have to kick me so I remember to say it out loud. You’re here for me and I’m here for you too. That’s how this _works_.”   
  
“I sort of…don’t want to…you have enough…”   
  
“Yeah, and I hate it, but this’s different. This is you.” James sighs, bumping their noses together. “Talk to Hugh before it gets this bad. Or Ian, or anyone. I won’t be jealous. I know it’s not easy. I _want_ you to have someone to fuckin’ lean on when I’m too— Just please also talk to me.”   
  
“When you’re too what?”   
  
“Broken. But I’m stronger if you ask me for things. So ask. We’ll figure it out together.”   
  
“You’re not broken!” Michael retorts automatically, to which James fires back, “Neither’re you!” and they gaze at each other for a while in the falling dusk.    
  
“I don’t have a road map,” James clarifies. “I don’t expect you to either. But we’ve both got decent motorbikes these days. No more Vespas. Can handle some tricky terrain.”   
  
“We can sort of see where the ride goes,” Michael whispers. “Together.”   
  
“And other people can come along sometimes for company. Helping set a pace. Picnics along the way. I’m losing track of my metaphor. Something about assisting with patch jobs and repairs. I love you.”   
  
“I love you,” Michael says, “and your metaphors,” and maybe he’s getting watery again but James is too so that’s okay, they’re going to be okay, the whole shining imperfect universe is okay, “and, um, you know the ginger-cream biscuits you make, the ones that taste like holidays, I know it’s sort of not anywhere close to a holiday, but I might be, y’know. If you want. Asking for.”   


  
_ take your time, and take mine too _   
_ I have time to spend _   
_ take your time, go with me through _   
_ times until time’s end _   


 


End file.
